On the eastern margin of the Bay of Naples, where it serves as a striking background to the city of that name, stands the renowned Vesuvius, the most celebrated volcano in the world. During many centuries before the Christian era it had been a dead and silent mountain. Throughout the earlier period of Roman history the people of Campania treated it with the contempt of ignorance, planting their vineyards on its fertile slopes and building their towns and villages around its base. Under the shadow of the silent mountain armies met and fought, and its crater was made the fort and lurking-place of Spartacus and his party of gladiators. But the time was at hand in which a more terrible enemy than a band of vengeful rebels was to emerge from that threatening cavity. The sleeping giant first showed signs of waking from his long slumber in 63 A.D., when earthquake convulsions shook the surrounding lands. These tremblings of the earth continued at intervals for sixteen years, doing much damage. At length, on the 24th of August of the year 79, came the culminating event. With a tremendous and terrible explosion the whole top of the mountain was torn out, and vast clouds of steam and volcanic ashes were hurled high into the air, lit into lurid light by the crimson gleams of the boiling lava below. The scene was a frightful one. The vast, tree-like cloud, kindled throughout its length by almost incessant flashes of lightning; the fiery glare that gleamed upward from the glowing lava; the total darkness that overspread the surrounding country as the dense mass of volcanic dust floated outward, a darkness only relieved by the glare that attended each new explosion, formed a spectacle of terror to make the stoutest heart quail, and to fill the weak and ignorant with dread of a final overthrow of the earth and its inhabitants. The elder Pliny, the famous naturalist, was then in command of a fleet at Misenum, in the vicinity. Led by his scientific interest, he approached the volcano to examine the eruption more closely, and fell a victim to the falling ashes or the choking fumes of sulphur that filled the air. His nephew, Pliny the younger, then only a boy of eighteen, has given a lucid account of what took place, in letters to the historian Tacitus. After describing the journey and death of his uncle, he goes on to speak of the violent earthquakes that shook the ground during the night. He continues with the story of the next day: "Though it was now morning, the light was exceedingly faint and languid; the buildings all around us tottered, and though we stood upon open ground, yet, as the place was narrow and confined, there was no remaining there without certain and great danger; we therefore resolved to leave the town. The people followed us in the utmost consternation, and, as to a mind distracted with terror every suggestion seems more prudent than its own, pressed in great crowds about us in our way out.